Students of the history of the Roman Empire fairly early on find out that the Romans particularly liked to use a condiment called garum, which was a fermented fish sauce.  The usual response to hearing this is some combination of disgust, horror, and amazement.  (That was certainly my response.)

But now I’ve just read this article about the history of ketchup, written by a linguistics professor from Stanford named Dan Jurafsky, on The Language of Food.  It turns out that ketchup originally contained no tomatoes, but was rather a fermented fish sauce imported from SE Asia that gradually changed its ingredient set until it’s what we eat now.

But what, you say*, does this have to do with Chex Mix?

Well, it turns out that Worcestershire sauce, one of the primary flavoring ingredients in Chex Mix, is made from fermented anchovies**.  That is, it was one of the originally imported types of ketchup.  (The recipe was probably imported from South or South East Asia by a British military officer, though the history is a bit muddled.)

Mmm, fermented fish sauce.

* Say it!

** There are non-fish Worcestershire sauces, but it is my understanding that the original recipe includes fermented fish.  That is certainly the case with Lea and Perrin’s.